Dismember

Dave moved along Pullman’s supernova of a porch, Georgie beating on his back with his fists. The blows almost felt nice, the way Dave imagined a massage might feel. Personally, he’d never gotten so much as a foot rub except from himself and Mr. Boots, who’d sometimes rubbed more than that.

No, Dave told himself, don’t think about that. His breathing had become suddenly heavy, and he realized he was squeezing Georgie much more tightly than was probably safe. Just forget it.

He trudged to the corner of the porch and stared through the darkness at the disconnected garage.

Yes. Of course.

On the other side of the house, the dog barked up a storm. Dave wondered if dogs ever got sore throats, if they made doggy throat lozenges or cough syrup. Surely not, but you never knew. People got a little crazy sometimes about their animals—he’d once watched a woman slather sunscreen on a thin-haired cat. He’d been fifteen at the time, and had giggled so loud he thought the woman almost noticed him in his hiding spot. Later, he’d caught the cat and slow roasted it over a campfire before bringing it back in a paper sack and leaving it on the woman’s front steps with a note reading: must not have used enough sunscreen.

The cat had died hard, yowling until long after the point at which it should have quieted, but Dave hadn’t felt especially bad about it. He’d never been much of a cat person.

Georgie had gone into another one of his periods of silent motionlessness. Dave removed him from his shoulder, lowered him into the grass on the other side of the porch railing, and then hopped over the barrier himself, the stab wound burning with every move he made, every breath he took. Once beside Georgie, Dave pressed his hand between the boy’s shoulder blades and steered him toward the property’s smaller structure. Their shoes slapped against the dewy grass, and they both shivered, Georgie a little more so than Dave.

Manny barked again, a series of three yelps followed by another pair, and Dave could only assume the boy had tied him up somewhere. They didn’t sound like the barks of a happy dog. To Dave, those barks said, Let me loose, let me go, I wanna play, too.

Dave reached up and touched his chest, pressed in on it but didn’t rub. Rubbing only would have worsened the pain, torn the hole bigger and maybe loosened whatever thin membrane held in the rest of his blood. He’d killed the kid’s old mother for much less, but that had been different. She was an adult, and a woman, and should have known better. Georgie had just done what any kid would do. He couldn’t kill Georgie. He wouldn’t. If he did, everything else would be pointless, and he’d never have another chance. Today was the day. His most important birthday ever.

He pushed the boy to the large rolling door and reached down to grab the handle.

Locked.

He yanked at it harder, trying to pop it open. Considering the flimsiness of their locks, some of these garage doors might as well have been held shut with scotch tape, but this one held tight, didn’t even rattle. If there had been windows, Dave would have pressed his face against them and peered inside, but the door’s series of solid panels completely concealed the interior.

Dave told Georgie to lead him around the side of the garage, and the boy obeyed.

If the new Davy was hiding inside, he’d hear them out here, would probably be scared, but that was okay. By the end of the night, little Davy would be safer than he’d been in a long, long time.

Georgie led him past two small windows, both covered from the inside. They circled around the back of the garage and found the regular-sized door on the other side. Dave eased Georgie aside and tried the knob. Locked. Without stopping to think, he swiveled and kicked the door just beside the knob. The wood cracked, but nothing else broke. Dave kicked again, and this time two cracks followed: first the door exploding inward and then it rebounding off a desk or shelf halfway through its swing. Dave could have seen the splintered doorjamb by only the light of the moon, but with the added illumination from the porch, it might as well have been the main attraction in a jeweler’s display case. He grinned at it and walked by.

Georgie didn’t follow him, which was good. In his state of confusion, the boy might have thought about grabbing something and using it against him. Dave didn’t want to consider what he might do if that happened. Anyway, the boy wasn’t exactly a cheetah; if he ran, Dave would hear him in plenty of time to catch up.

He smelled cut cedar and pine, the thicker scents of paint, glue, and machine grease, but saw none of it. Not yet. He didn’t know where the light switch was, or if there was a switch at all. For all he knew, you controlled the lights in here with a pull chain or a breaker on a panel board. He’d watched the main house plenty, had entered it several times when the Pullmans were away, but he hadn’t bothered investigating the workshop. He’d peeked in one time, just a perfunctory look through the only bit of unblocked window he’d found, took in enough to realize it was a workshop and not a garage, seen the tools and the wood and the half-formed furniture. But he hadn’t studied it, hadn’t thought he needed to. Now, despite all the planning he’d done, he wished he’d done a little more.

Still, his eyes adjusted abnormally fast, and it didn’t take long for him to spot the tips of two sneakers trembling in the sawdust beneath a table to his right.

“Hey,” he said and bumped purposefully into the corner of the table, feigning blindness. “You okay in here?”

The shoes stopped trembling and became very still.

“It’s okay to be scared,” he said. “I would have been.” He took a step forward. “Which means it would be wrong if you weren’t.”

The shoes pulled back and disappeared from Dave’s sight, but he didn’t worry. Where could the boy go?

Nowhere, of course. Pullman would have been better off if he had sent him to the neighbors.

Dave stooped, then knelt, bending until he could peek beneath the table’s surface and into Davy’s hiding spot. He imagined the boy triggering a drill and jamming it into his eye, or coming at his throat with a pair of utility knives, but no attack came. The boy sat hugging his legs, wide eyed, looking as if he’d planned only on staying hidden forever and ever. Dave thought that was probably the smartest thing he could have done.

Dave had expected violence today—had, to some extent, been looking forward to it—but now he’d had enough. He’d been punched, kicked, scratched, stabbed, had rocks thrown at his head and a dog’s teeth inches away from the softest parts of his neck. He deserved a break.

He was half tempted to knock the kid out, not give him a chance to fight back, but he knew he couldn’t bring himself to do that. The kid was him, after all, or soon would be.

Instead of grabbing for the child, Dave dropped into a sitting position and folded his hands in his lap. “You like dogs?” he asked. He didn’t need to ask, because he knew he liked dogs, remembered liking them despite the way their breath sometimes stunk when they licked your face.

Davy looked out at him, looked right into his eyes, as if he had Dave’s own superb night vision. “Where’s my daddy?”

Dave had answers all ready for these types of questions, though he had hoped the mention of Manny would divert the boy’s attention. “I’m going to take you to him,” he said, which was true in some ways and only a slight stretch of the truth in others. “He’s hurt.” This was a fact no matter how you looked at it.

“You hurt him.” It wasn’t a question, but neither was it an accusation.

“Not exactly,” Dave said, “but I am going to fix m…your daddy all up. Promise.”

Davy didn’t move, smile, or blink. Dave heard rustling from outside, but not running, and wondered what Georgie was up to.

“What do you say?” He focused on the boy beneath the table and smiled, not knowing if Davy could make out the change in his facial features or not. “Georgie and Manny are waiting. We’ll all go find your daddy together. Don’t you want to be with your daddy?”

“Yes,” Davy said, though he still appeared uncertain. “He’s not…dead?”

“Heaven forbid,” said Dave. “Now come on out of there.”

And after only a few more seconds of leg-hugging and frowning, Davy did. He got onto his hands and knees, paying extra close attention to the tabletop above him, and crawled out across the sawdust. Dave didn’t try to help him because he knew doing so would only scare Davy. Young children were sometimes that way, like wild animals. If you stood still, didn’t give them any reason to fear you, they’d eventually relax, but the second you inched in their direction, they were a mile away before you knew they were gone.

Dave waited for Davy to get to his feet, brush the dust off his shorts, knees, and palms, and move between